Quotes About Bias

While its proponents might get the facts wrong, they get the subjective experience right.

That trial is not fair where affection is judge

Regression effects teach us specious lessons about the relative effectiveness of reward and punishment.

As dysfunctional as they may be on occasion, our theories, preconceptions, and "biases" are what make us smart.

Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence. An essential corrollary of this appreciation should be an awareness of how often our everyday experience presents us with biased samples of information.

confirmatory events are in fact much more memorable than non-confirmatory events.

Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do.

In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked.

The false consensus effect refers to the tendency for people's own beliefs, values, and habits to bias their estimates of how widely such views and habits are shared by others.

This can sound rather grim, but it does have a positive flip-side: It suggests that our negative assessments of other people are less likely than our positive assessments to be correct, and we should give our foes another chance.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not just poorly informed, they're misinformed.

Unable to see their own biases, most people will simply drive each other crazy arguing rather than accept answers that contradict what they already think about the subject. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt summed it up neatly when he observed that when facts conflict with our values, "almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence."15

we are never in a proper condition of doing justice to others, while we continue under the influence of some leading partiality, so neither are we capable of doing it to ourselves while we remain fettered by any obstinate prejudice. And

He had spent forty years noticing that when women cut their hair short, other women would say it was "cute" or "smart" or some such thing, but he had never, in any of the thousand times when he'd seen it, heard anything approaching approval by any male.

When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.

That men aren't naturally good; but girls are.

Serge nodded. 'And I respect your opinion because you smoke marijuana. You're chemically biased against violence and job applications.

There's no question that I am biased toward the Hebrew calendar over the Gregorian one.

I've always said I can't tell sometimes that people even have an album out until I see them nominated for a Grammy. I think country gets dumped on across the board by the Grammys.

There were lots of smart black people at Harvard before Barack Obama, but none of them ever got to head up the law review. There has been a history of discrimination.

The reflexive allergy to L.A. that a lot of New Yorkers have, I feel like it's kind of nonsense.

I think fear has been racialised. When you get someone who says 'I was afraid' of a big black guy, that's enough to say, 'Okay, not guilty,' or, 'No indictment.' It's persisted over generations, and it needs to stop.